I've seen lot's of people writing (or using) third party abstraction frameworks on
top of ORM solutions like Hibernate so that they can potentially get rid of one ORM
engine to another (or even an other technology).
Such frameworks are even considered by some architectsas a must-have.

I was looking for a good way to integrate DBUnit with Seam, so that I can prepare a dataset for functional testing without too much hassle. This is what I came up with, a test superclass that integrates with Seam and adds DBUnit operations that run before and after every test method.

Norman Richards (super-smart/thoughtful guy doing product management stuff at JBoss) has posted a download of the Seam hands-on lab from JBoss World. This is a nice way to get started with Seam, and much more interesting than listening to me rant on about conversations and state management and unified component models for an hour and a half...

Usually I don't like to climb into these kind of discussions - I usually keep quiet unless I have something more to add than metoo. But forgive me for mentioning that, on balance, I agree with the many people arguing that bundling Derby in the JDK is a Bad Idea. My concern is that this decision naturally forces projects like Hibernate to have to support Derby, no matter what our better judgement as to the maturity/stability of the product at this stage. Perhaps if/when Derby has shown itself to be a truly production-ready platform, this decision could be better justified. But for now, Derby is neither usable in production, nor is it really a good choice for development (HSQL is much more usable at development time, and that is what 95% of people are using).

Last week thousands of people downloaded Seam 1.0 and tried it out. Inevitably, they picked up on a couple of bugs of the minorish variety. At the same time, I was getting some useful feedback from users who are already developing and/or deploying Seam applications at JBoss World. Finally, Roger Kitain from Sun reported a problem running Seam on GlassFish. So, I needed to do a 1.0.1 release:

The Seam project is proud to announce the release of JBoss Seam 1.0 GA, an application framework for Java EE 5. Seam aims to be the most productive platform for development of enterprise and rich internet applications in any programming language.